Tag: Big Science

Over the past 35 years, I’ve exposed as least as much fraudulent science as any reporter around. That’s just a fact.

I mention it, because one would expect I’ve learned a few lessons in the process.

And I have.

Government-backed science exists because it is a fine weapon to use, in order to force an agenda of control over the population.

We aren’t talking about knowledge here. Knowledge is irrelevant. What counts is: ‘How can we fabricate something that looks like the truth?’

I keep pointing this out: we’re dealing with reality builders. In this case, they make their roads and fences and buildings out of data, and they massage and invent the data out of thin air to suit their purposes. After all, they also invent money out of thin air.

Since 1987, one of my goals as a reporter has been to educate the public about false science.

Between then and now, I have found that, with remarkably few exceptions, mainstream reporters are studiously indifferent to false science.

They shy away from it. They pretend “it couldn’t be.” They refuse to consider facts. They and their editors parrot “the experts.”

Official science has a stranglehold on major media. It has the force of a State religion. When you stop and think about it, official science is, in a significant sense, a holy church. Therefore, it is no surprise that the church’s spokespeople would wield power over major information outlets.

These prelates invent, guard, and dispense “what is known.” That was precisely the role of the Roman Church in times past. And those professionals within the modern Church of Science are severely punished when they leave the fold and accuse their former masters of lies and crimes. They are blackballed, discredited, and stripped of their licenses. At the very least.

Totalitarian science lets you know you’re living in a totalitarian society.

The government, the press, the mega-corporations, the prestigious foundations, the academic institutions, the “humanitarian” organizations say:

“This is the disease. This is its name. This is what causes it. This is the drug that treats it. This is the vaccine that prevents it.”

“This is how accurate diagnosis is done. These are the tests. These are the possible results and what they mean.”

“Here are the genes. This is what they do. This is how they can be changed and substituted and manipulated. These are the outcomes.”

“These are the data and the statistics. They are correct. There can be no argument about them.”

“This is life. These are the components of life. All change and improvement result from our management of the components.”

“This is the path. It is governed by truth which our science reveals. Walk the path. We will inform you when you stray. We will report new improvements.”

“This is the end. You can go no farther. You must give up the ghost. We will remember you.”

We are now witnessing the acceleration of Official Science. Of course, that term is an internal contradiction. But the State shrugs and moves forward.

The notion that the State can put its seal on favored science, enforce it, and punish its competitors, is anathema to a free society.

For example: declaring that psychiatrists can appear in court as expert witnesses, when none of the 300 so-called mental disorders listed in the psychiatric literature are diagnosed by laboratory tests.

For example: stating that vaccination is mandatory, in order to protect the vaccinated (who are supposed to be immune) from the unvaccinated. An absurdity on its face.

For example: announcing that the science of climate change is “settled,” when there are, in fact, huge numbers of researchers who disagree. —And then, drafting legislation and issuing executive orders based on the decidedly unsettled science.

For example: officially approving the release and sale of medical drugs (“safe and effective”) which go on to kill, at a conservative estimate, 100,000 Americans every year. And then refusing to investigate or punish the agents of these drug approvals (the FDA).

For example: permitting the widespread use of genetically modified food crops, based on no studies of their impact on human health. And then, arbitrarily announcing that the herbicide, Roundup, for which many of these crops are specifically designed, is non-toxic.

For example: declaring and promoting the existence of various epidemics, when the viruses purportedly causing them are not proven to exist or not proven to cause human illness (SARS, West Nile, Swine Flu, etc.)

A few of you reading this have been with me since 1988, when I published my first book, AIDS INC., Scandal of the Century. Among other conclusions, I pointed out that HIV had never been shown to cause human illness; the front-line drug given to AIDS patients, AZT, was overwhelmingly toxic; and what was being called AIDS was actually a diverse number immune-suppressing conditions.

Others of you have found my work more recently. I always return to the subject of false science, because it is the most powerful long-term instrument for repression, political control, and destruction of human life.

As I’ve stated on many occasions, medical science is ideal for mounting and launching covert ops aimed at populations—because it appears to be politically neutral, without any allegiance to State interests.

Unfortunately, medical science, on many fronts, has been hijacked and taken over. The profit motive is one objective, but beyond that, there is a more embracing goal:

Totalitarian control.

On the issue of vaccines, I’ve written much about their dangers and ineffectiveness. But also consider this: the push for mandatory vaccination goes a long way toward creating a herd effect—which is really a social construction.

In other words, parents are propagandized to think of themselves as a kind of synthetic artificial “community.”

“Here we are. We are the fathers and mothers. We must all protect our children against the outliers, the rebels, the defectors, the crazy ones who refuse to vaccinate their own children. We are all in this together. They are the threat. The enemy. We are good. We know the truth. They are evil.”

This “community of the willing” are dedicated to what the government tells them. They are crusaders imbued with group-think. They run around promoting “safety and protection.” This group consciousness is entirely an artifact, propelled by official science.

The crusaders are, in effect, agents of the State.

They are created by the State.

Androids.

They live in an absurd Twilight Zone where fear of germs (the tiny invisible terrorists) demands coercive action against the individuals who see through the whole illusion.

This is what official science can achieve. This is how it can enlist obedient foot soldiers and spies who don’t have the faintest idea about how they’re being used.

This is a variant on Orwell’s 1984. The citizens are owned by the all-embracing State, but they aren’t even aware of it.

That’s quite a trick.

One of my favorite examples of double-think or reverse-think is the antibody test. It is given to diagnosis diseases. Antibodies are immune-system scouts sent out to identify germ-intruders, which can then be wiped out by other immune-system troops.

Prior to 1985, the prevailing view of a positive antibody test was: the patient is doing well; his body detected the germ and dispensed with it. After 1985, the view was suddenly: this is bad news; the patient is sick or he is on the verge of getting sick; he has the germ in his body; it does harm.

Within the medical community, no one (with very few exceptions) raised hell over this massive switch. It was accepted. It was actually good for business. Now, many more people could be labeled “needs treatment,” whereas before, they would have been labeled “healthy.”

While I was writing my first book, AIDS INC., in 1987-8, I wrote the FDA asking about a possible AIDS vaccine. I was told the following: every person given such a vaccine would, of course, produce antibodies against HIV. That is the whole purpose of a vaccine: to produce antibodies.

However, I was informed, patients receiving this vaccine would be given a letter to carry with them, in case they were ever tested for HIV and came up positive. The letter would explain that the antibodies causing the positive test were the result of the vaccine, not the result of “natural” action inside the patient’s body.

In other words, the very same antibodies were either protective against AIDS (good) or indicative of deadly disease (bad).

This was the contradictory and ridiculous and extraordinary pronouncement of official science.

It carries over into every disease for which an antibody test is administered. If a vaccine against disease X is given, it delivers immunity, because it produces antibodies. But if a diagnostic test for disease X reveals the presence of the same antibodies, naturally produced in the body, this is taken as a sign of illness.

Extrapolated to a more general level, the Word is: synthetic medical treatment is good; the action of the body to heal itself is incompetent.

This is a type of superstition that would astonish even the most “primitive” societies.

It no longer astonishes me. I see it everywhere in official science.

From the medical establishment’s point of view, being alive is a medical condition.

The most useful politicians—as far as official science is concerned—are those who automatically promote its findings. Such politicians are lifted into prominence. They are champions of the Science Matrix. They never ask questions. They never doubt. They never make waves. They blithely travel their merry way into new positions of power, knowing they have enormous elite support behind them. When they need to lie, they lie. They are taught that those who question or reject official science are a tiny ‘demographic’ who can be ignored during election campaigns. ‘Don’t worry about them. They don’t count.’ These politicians are never in the trenches with the people on issues of health.

The elite Plan is universal collectivism, in which all citizens are atoms of a giant molecule. Many lies need to be told in order to make that dream/nightmare come true. If some of those lies are about science, so much the better. People believe in science.

Think about the agendas behind universal vaccination, climate change, universal psychiatric treatment, GMO food, and other ‘science-based’ frauds. They all imply a model, in which individuals give up their power in exchange for ‘doing good’ and becoming members of the largest group in the world: ‘disabled’ people with needs that must be addressed and satisfied.

Instead of supporting the liberation of the individual, the controllers want to squash it. Why? Because they fear individual power. It is forever the unpredictable wild card. They want a society in which every thought an individual thinks connects him to a greater whole—and if that sounds attractive, understand that this Whole is a fiction, intentionally faked to resemble a genuine oceanic feeling. The elite Whole is ultimately a trance-like fiction that will slow down time to a crawl, and shrink space to a sliver, and focus attention on a single mandate: wait for the next instruction from above, content in the knowledge that it will benefit all of humanity.”

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

In these pages, I’ve emphasized that mainstream news often fails to follow up on their own stories.

They publish a shocking account of a scandal, and then they drop it like a hot potato.

Why? There are several reasons, but the most important is: the scandal is too revealing. It indicts an institution or organization that, in the long run, must be protected.

In 2014-15, stories appeared in the press about the phenomenal corruption of the FBI evidence lab. But since then, there has been very little follow-up. I find no compelling evidence that the federal government has fixed the problem.

Here is a sample of the 2014-15 stories:

April 20, 2015, The Atlantic: “…the Washington Post made clear Saturday in an article that begins with a punch to the gut… ‘Nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000,’ the newspaper reported, adding that ‘the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death’.”

August 12, 2014, New Scientist: “…the initial results were released of an ongoing review of thousands of criminal cases in which FBI scientists’ testimony may have led to wrongful convictions – including for some people now on death row…[an FBI source states] ’we teach these people [lab techs in training] for two weeks, and they would go back to their laboratories with a certificate of completion and be told: Great you’re qualified to do this [analysis of evidence] – here’s your caseload.’”

Washington Post, April 18, 2015: “The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.”

“Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.”

“The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.”

Giant long-term scandal and corruption. The story is covered. Then it disappears.

Here is one reason why. If the press outlets continued to search out every aspect of the story, they would come upon numerous prosecutors who routinely relied on false FBI lab reports in trials. Some of those prosecutors would be exposed for knowingly accepting fake evidence from the FBI, in order to make their cases.

The scandal would spread like ink on a blotter.

Major media news picks their spots. They choose to pound on certain stories day after day, in an effort to convince the public of certain “facts.” They studiously refuse to dig and keep digging on other stories, hoping the public will forget.

Remember this, forget that.

Journalism schools don’t teach their students that this is the way to do news. After graduating and finding jobs, young reporters catch on.

They catch on and go along.

That’s how their ideals crumble and disintegrate.

That’s how they become agents and blunt weapons for their bosses.

That’s how they become alcoholics and denizens traveling through a dim underworld of lies.

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

The notion that a political agenda underlies such scientific pronouncements is unthinkable.

So as an example, a very specific example of fake science, let’s look back at the attack on Oklahoma City.

On April 19, 1995, one-third of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City blew up, killing 169 people and wounding 680 others.

Three men were arrested and convicted: Tim McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier. McVeigh was put to death on June 11, 2001, Nichols is currently serving multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole, and Fortier was sentenced to 12 years (he served that term and was released).

The official narrative of the bombing stated: A Ryder truck parked at the curb outside the Murrah Building contained barrels of ammonium nitrate plus fuel oil (ANFO bombs), and their coordinated explosion occurred shortly after 9AM on the morning of April 19th.

In addition to the deaths and the woundings, the explosion impacted 324 buildings and 86 cars in the area.

(In my 1995, book, “The Oklahoma City Bombing, the Suppressed Truth,” I laid to rest the claim that ANFO bombs could have caused that much damage; and more importantly, I showed that an explosion coming out of a Ryder truck at the curb could not have caused the particular profile of damage sustained by the Murrah Building.)

The vaunted FBI lab decided that, indeed, all the damage and death HAD been caused by ANFO bombs in the Ryder truck.

But wait.

Buckle up.

Two years after the bombing, on March 22, 1997, we had this from CNN: “The Justice Department inspector general’s office has determined that the FBI crime laboratory working on the Oklahoma City bombing case made ‘scientifically unsound’ conclusions that were ‘biased in favor of the prosecution,’ The Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.”

“…[FBI] supervisors approved lab reports that they ‘cannot support’ and…FBI lab officials may have erred about the size of the blast, the amount of explosives involved and the type of explosives used in the bombing[!].”

“…harshest criticism was of David Williams, a supervisory agent in the [FBI] explosives unit, the paper [LA Times] said. Those flaws reportedly include the basis of his determination that the main charge of the explosion was ammonium nitrate. The inspector general called such a determination ‘inappropriate,’ the Times said.”

“…FBI officials found a receipt for ammonium nitrate at defendant [Terry] Nichols’ home and, because of that discovery, Williams slanted his conclusion to match the evidence.”

And with those revelations, the case, the investigation, the court trials, and press probes should have taken a whole new direction. But they didn’t.

The fake science was allowed to stand.

Therefore, other paths of investigation were abandoned. If bombs did, in fact, explode in the Ryder truck, but didn’t cause the major damage, then those bombs were a cover for other explosions of separate origin—for example, charges wired inside the columns of the Murrah Building, triggered at the exact moment the Ryder Truck explosion occurred.

Now we would be talking about a very sophisticated operation, far beyond the technical skills of McVeigh, Nichols, and Fortier.

Who knows where an honest in-depth investigation would have led? The whole idea of anti-government militia terrorism in the OKC attack—symbolized by McVeigh—was used by President Bill Clinton to bring the frightened public “back to the federal government” as their ultimate protector and savior.

Instead, the public might have been treated to a true story about a false flag operation, in which case President Clinton’s massaged message would never have been delivered.

But the fake crooked science pushed by the FBI lab was permitted to stand—despite exposure as fraud—and the story of militia terrorists trying to bring down the federal government was allowed to stand as well.

The year 1995 was rife with anti-government sentiment in America. This wasn’t merely a bunch of militias talking about insurrection. This was widespread dissatisfaction, on the part of many Americans, who were seeing federal power expand beyond any semblance of constitutionality.

As an object lesson, the Oklahoma Bombing was: “You see what happens when crazy people are allowed to own guns and oppose the government? Stop listening to anti-government rhetoric. It’s horribly dangerous. We, the government, are here to protect you. Come home to us. Have faith in us. We’ll punish the offenders. We’ll make America safe again. Let’s all come together and oppose these maniacs who want to destroy our way of life…”

The lesson worked.

Many scared Americans signed on to Clinton’s agenda.

And fake FBI science was used to bolster that agenda.

Even when exposed as fake by mainstream press outlets—however briefly, with no determined follow-up—the federal brainwashing held. The myth was stronger than reality.

If the federal government can egregiously lie about an event as huge as the Oklahoma Bombing, using fake science as a cover—what wouldn’t they lie about?

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

What do you get when you combine behavioural science with big data and use the new Frankenstein hybrid to better influence people’s thoughts, opinions and desires? Why, psychographics of course! Join James today as he delves into the murky world of billionaire hedge fund owners, creepy thought manipulators and the Trump campaign.

More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature‘s survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research.

The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards reproducibility. Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant ‘crisis’ of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature.

Data on how much of the scientific literature is reproducible are rare and generally bleak. The best-known analyses, from psychology1 and cancer biology2, found rates of around 40% and 10%, respectively. Our survey respondents were more optimistic: 73% said that they think that at least half of the papers in their field can be trusted, with physicists and chemists generally showing the most confidence.

The results capture a confusing snapshot of attitudes around these issues, says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. “At the current time there is no consensus on what reproducibility is or should be.” But just recognizing that is a step forward, he says. “The next step may be identifying what is the problem and to get a consensus.”

Failing to reproduce results is a rite of passage, says Marcus Munafo, a biological psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK, who has a long-standing interest in scientific reproducibility. When he was a student, he says, “I tried to replicate what looked simple from the literature, and wasn’t able to. Then I had a crisis of confidence, and then I learned that my experience wasn’t uncommon.”

The challenge is not to eliminate problems with reproducibility in published work. Being at the cutting edge of science means that sometimes results will not be robust, says Munafo. “We want to be discovering new things but not generating too many false leads.”

The scale of reproducibility

But sorting discoveries from false leads can be discomfiting. Although the vast majority of researchers in our survey had failed to reproduce an experiment, less than 20% of respondents said that they had ever been contacted by another researcher unable to reproduce their work. Our results are strikingly similar to another online survey of nearly 900 members of the American Society for Cell Biology (see go.nature.com/kbzs2b). That may be because such conversations are difficult. If experimenters reach out to the original researchers for help, they risk appearing incompetent or accusatory, or revealing too much about their own projects.

A minority of respondents reported ever having tried to publish a replication study. When work does not reproduce, researchers often assume there is a perfectly valid (and probably boring) reason. What’s more, incentives to publish positive replications are low and journals can be reluctant to publish negative findings. In fact, several respondents who had published a failed replication said that editors and reviewers demanded that they play down comparisons with the original study.

Nevertheless, 24% said that they had been able to publish a successful replication and 13% had published a failed replication. Acceptance was more common than persistent rejection: only 12% reported being unable to publish successful attempts to reproduce others’ work; 10% reported being unable to publish unsuccessful attempts.

Survey respondent Abraham Al-Ahmad at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Amarillo expected a “cold and dry rejection” when he submitted a manuscript explaining why a stem-cell technique had stopped working in his hands. He was pleasantly surprised when the paper was accepted3. The reason, he thinks, is because it offered a workaround for the problem.

Others place the ability to publish replication attempts down to a combination of luck, persistence and editors’ inclinations. Survey respondent Michael Adams, a drug-development consultant, says that work showing severe flaws in an animal model of diabetes has been rejected six times, in part because it does not reveal a new drug target. By contrast, he says, work refuting the efficacy of a compound to treat Chagas disease was quickly accepted4.

The corrective measures

One-third of respondents said that their labs had taken concrete steps to improve reproducibility within the past five years. Rates ranged from a high of 41% in medicine to a low of 24% in physics and engineering. Free-text responses suggested that redoing the work or asking someone else within a lab to repeat the work is the most common practice. Also common are efforts to beef up the documentation and standardization of experimental methods.

Any of these can be a major undertaking. A biochemistry graduate student in the United Kingdom, who asked not to be named, says that efforts to reproduce work for her lab’s projects doubles the time and materials used — in addition to the time taken to troubleshoot when some things invariably don’t work. Although replication does boost confidence in results, she says, the costs mean that she performs checks only for innovative projects or unexpected results.

Consolidating methods is a project unto itself, says Laura Shankman, a postdoc studying smooth muscle cells at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. After several postdocs and graduate students left her lab within a short time, remaining members had trouble getting consistent results in their experiments. The lab decided to take some time off from new questions to repeat published work, and this revealed that lab protocols had gradually diverged. She thinks that the lab saved money overall by getting synchronized instead of troubleshooting failed experiments piecemeal, but that it was a long-term investment.

Irakli Loladze, a mathematical biologist at Bryan College of Health Sciences in Lincoln, Nebraska, estimates that efforts to ensure reproducibility can increase the time spent on a project by 30%, even for his theoretical work. He checks that all steps from raw data to the final figure can be retraced. But those tasks quickly become just part of the job. “Reproducibility is like brushing your teeth,” he says. “It is good for you, but it takes time and effort. Once you learn it, it becomes a habit.”

One of the best-publicized approaches to boosting reproducibility is pre-registration, where scientists submit hypotheses and plans for data analysis to a third party before performing experiments, to prevent cherry-picking statistically significant results later. Fewer than a dozen people mentioned this strategy. One who did was Hanne Watkins, a graduate student studying moral decision-making at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Going back to her original questions after collecting data, she says, kept her from going down a rabbit hole. And the process, although time consuming, was no more arduous than getting ethical approval or formatting survey questions. “If it’s built in right from the start,” she says, “it’s just part of the routine of doing a study.”

The cause

The survey asked scientists what led to problems in reproducibility. More than 60% of respondents said that each of two factors — pressure to publish and selective reporting — always or often contributed. More than half pointed to insufficient replication in the lab, poor oversight or low statistical power. A smaller proportion pointed to obstacles such as variability in reagents or the use of specialized techniques that are difficult to repeat.

But all these factors are exacerbated by common forces, says Judith Kimble, a developmental biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison: competition for grants and positions, and a growing burden of bureaucracy that takes away from time spent doing and designing research. “Everyone is stretched thinner these days,” she says. And the cost extends beyond any particular research project. If graduate students train in labs where senior members have little time for their juniors, they may go on to establish their own labs without having a model of how training and mentoring should work. “They will go off and make it worse,” Kimble says.

What can be done?

Respondents were asked to rate 11 different approaches to improving reproducibility in science, and all got ringing endorsements. Nearly 90% — more than 1,000 people — ticked “More robust experimental design” “better statistics” and “better mentorship”. Those ranked higher than the option of providing incentives (such as funding or credit towards tenure) for reproducibility-enhancing practices. But even the lowest-ranked item — journal checklists — won a whopping 69% endorsement.

The survey — which was e-mailed to Nature readers and advertised on affiliated websites and social-media outlets as being ‘about reproducibility’ — probably selected for respondents who are more receptive to and aware of concerns about reproducibility. Nevertheless, the results suggest that journals, funders and research institutions that advance policies to address the issue would probably find cooperation, says John Ioannidis, who studies scientific robustness at Stanford University in California. “People would probably welcome such initiatives.” About 80% of respondents thought that funders and publishers should do more to improve reproducibility.

“It’s healthy that people are aware of the issues and open to a range of straightforward ways to improve them,” says Munafo. And given that these ideas are being widely discussed, even in mainstream media, tackling the initiative now may be crucial. “If we don’t act on this, then the moment will pass, and people will get tired of being told that they need to do something.”

Just in case you read the title of this blog, and don’t know who Ewen Cameron was, a little history is in order: Cameron was a psychologist/psychiatrist involved in the CIA’s infamous mind-control program, MK-Ultra. Cameron had his “laboratory” in a psychiatric hospital in Canada, where he subjected his victims (I won’t use the word “patients” here, because what Cameron did is in my opinion unspeakable) to a regime of drug cocktails, continual sleep (nor for hours, but for days at a time), and repeated endless bombardment of tape recorders playing back, for hours on end, recorded messages. He called all this “psychic driving,” and his goal was to eliminate “bad personality habits” (or even the personality itself) and to replace it with “something else”, that something else being the recorded endlessly repeated messages. If his “procedures” (and we’ve only very briefly summarized them) sound a little like the Nazi doctors in World War Two, then you understand the measure of the torture he was inflicting.

But imagine a magic drug that could do the same thing, without the endless weeks of sleep, tape-recorded looped messages, and cocktails. Indeed, if one digs a little bit into the history of the CIA’s various mind-control programs – Projects Bluebird, Artichoke, or MK-Ultra – one of the things being investigated was precisely the use of drugs for memory and behavior alteration.

Which brings us to this rather frightening article that was shared by Mr. C.S. this week:

Assuming the article to be true, then the implications of the following would fulfill Dr. Cameron’s wildest fantasies of “psychic driving” and memory wipes:

Scientists have long known that creating new memories and storing old ones involve the creation of proteins in the synapse, where two brain cells meet. For this process to be successful, genes must be expressed in the nucleus of the cell, and this is where a key enzyme can turn genes on or off as new memories are formed. It’s also believed that this enzyme, which is known as ACSS2, plays a role in the memory impairment that is seen in neurodegenerative disorders.

In the study, the researchers found that lowering ACSS2 levels in mice reduced the expression of memory genes, thereby stopping the formation of long-term memories. Mice who had reduced enzyme levels showed no interest in a ball they saw the previous day, whereas those with normal levels of the enzyme were interested in the ball.

Now the researchers are hoping to use this knowledge to stop traumatic memories from forming in people with PTSD simply by blocking the brain’s ACSS2. This might sound like a good idea to those of us who are haunted by some sort of trauma, but there’s also the potential for this to be used for more sinister reasons.

As the article goes on to point out, what’s to prevent the “intelligence” agencies of the modern police state from using the capability to erase memories in individuals (or for that matter, whole populations), it finds “inconvenient”, or from planting completely false memories. In these, Cameron’s goal of completely wiping one personality and replacing it with another come close to reality, without the corresponding torture he inflicted.

Which brings us to the high octane speculation of the day: why investigate such things at all? As the article avers, some beneficial uses could be had, but I strongly suspect that all those assurances we were given decades ago from our intelligence agencies during the Church Committee were just that: assurances, nothing more, and that the covert funding and investigation of mind control techniques and technologies continued. With its track record of having given LSD to unsuspecting victims to study their responses – all under the aegis of its mind control programs – one can see where this is going, for in a world where chemicals are sprayed over whole populations without their knowledge (in many cases) and without their consent (in most), it takes little imagination to see that a study of “whole population effects” could be had with the appropriate spraying, or slipping a little “mind wipe enzyme” into a town’s water supply, and watching and studying the results. Indeed, in 1984(note the year) American actor Tim Matheson starred with co-star Hume Cronyn in the movie Impulse, which was about precisely such a scenario. Add a false news story or two and one has a frightening scenario where whole populations might be induced to “remember” something that didn’t actually happen, or to forget something that did.

I am reminded of the late 1960s and 1970s, when various gurus of the “drug culture” actually viewed psychedelics are a means of accessing “alternate worlds,” and in a universe where one has quantum physicists emphasizing the role of the observer in the creation of reality, and where they are talking about “multiple worlds” hypotheses, such an experiment might even have cosmological implications.

About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and “strange stuff”. His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into “alternative history and science”.

Just when you thought the aspirations and plans of modern science couldn’t possibly become more diabolical (or, if one prefer, sacrilegious), an article comes along to renew your hope that the world continues on its path of normalcy, and that many scientists are, indeed, just as wild-eyed-nuts as you always thought them to be. And this week, apparently many people were relieved and reassured that the mad scientist is not a thing of the past or a species that died out, but a real, living creature deserving of our awe and respect. Ms. M.W. and many others found this, and shared it, doubtless because they were concerned that I was losing hope that there were no more mad scientists:

Way back when I first started writing about these strange topics in The Giza Death Star, I made the observation that physical immortality might not be such a good thing, without a commensurate and corresponding improvement in human spirituality and morality. In this, I took my cue from an ancient Greek Church Father named St. John Chrysostom, who warned about the same thing, and who stated that it was death, in fact, that formed the crucial condition for the possibility of human repentance and a change of mind, for it cut off further progress in evil. Taking this as my cue, in the final pages of that book, I asked people to imagine if such immortality were possible, or even a dramatically extended life span were possible – both of which are now being openly discussed and touted in serious and not-so-serious literature – what it might mean for the resulting civilization? One thing that would result, I pointed out, was a vastly expanded and accelerated scientific and technological development. One individual would, in such a condition, be able to learn and to master several academic disciplines, not just one.The explosion of technology and science would dwarf anything we have seen thus far. But the other consequence would be for moral progress. Imagine, I said back then, an Albert Schweitzer having not a century, but centuries or even millennia to do good things, or, conversely, a Mao Tse-Tung, a Josif Stalin, a Pol Pot or an Adolf Hitler, having that long to “perfect their progress in evil,” and one gets a clear picture of the sharp moral contradictions such a society would be in. And please note: this problem is not a problem that, to my knowledge, is receiving anything close to the attention it needs in the transhumanism-virtual immortality community. The sole focus is on the science; if we can do it, we should do it.

Now we have this:

Bioquark, a Philadelphia-based company, announced in late 2016 that they believe brain death is not ‘irreversible’.

And now, CEO Ira Pastor has revealed they will soon be testing an unprecedented stem cell method on patients in an unidentified country in Latin America, confirming the details in the next few months.

To be declared officially dead in the majority of countries, you have to experience complete and irreversible loss of brain function, or ‘brain death’.

According to Pastor, Bioquark has developed a series of injections that can reboot the brain – and they plan to try it out on humans this year.

They have no plans to test on animals first.

…

The first stage, named ‘First In Human Neuro-Regeneration & Neuro-Reanimation’ was slated to be a non-randomized, single group ‘proof of concept’ study.

The team said they planned to examine individuals aged 15-65 declared brain dead from a traumatic brain injury using MRI scans, in order to look for possible signs of brain death reversal.

Specifically, they planned to break it down into three stages.

First, they would harvest stem cells from the patient’s own blood, and inject this back into their body.

Next, the patient would receive a dose of peptides injected into their spinal cord.

Finally, they would undergo a 15-day course of nerve stimulation involving lasers and median nerve stimulation to try and bring about the reversal of brain death, whilst monitoring the patients using MRI scans.

Light, chemistry, and stem cells and DNA. If one didn’t know any better, one would swear one was looking at the broad chronological progression of Genesis 1.

But I digress.

The problem here is, one notices, the almost complete avoidance of the moral question. Let’s assume the technology works and that one can, literally, resurrect the dead scientifically. And let us assume the project reaches the stage of perfection envisioned by the Russian Cosmists, like Nikolai Fedorov. The cosmists, recall, want to extend the resurrection-by-science principle to the entire history of one’s ancestors. But should this occur, then what about resurrecting people like Stalin, Mao, or Hitler? The sad truth is, some people still “revere” those twisted and murderous people as heroes. The sad truth is, some people would attempt to do it, if given the means to do so.

But there’s an even bigger problem. The entire project is predicated on the materialist assumption that “brain function equals the person.” Regular readers here know that I have never subscribed to such a view, nor have I subscribed to the view, conversely, that there is no relationship between a person’s “personhood” and the functions of their soul, which would include, of course, the functions of their will, intellect, emotions, and brain. It is, I suspect, a very complex phenomenon not neatly divided into tidy Cartesian dualisms, with numerous feedback loops between the two. This said, however, the problem arises then that the brain is not the creator of individuality, but rather, its transducer (and, if I may employ a more ancient version of the term, its traducer). Thus, the possibility arises that one might “revive” a brain, and traduce or transduce a different individual than one “recalls” being present prior to brain death. Already some psychologists have written – and published – papers suggesting that certain mental disorders such as bipolarity and schizophrenia might not be disorders in any standard sense, but rather a phenomenon where an individual is inhabiting two very different and parallel universes at the same time. In this they draw upon the many worlds hypotheses of qauntum mechanics.

In short, for my money, I have no doubt that ultimately, some sort of “scientific” resurrection technique might be possible. But I suspect it will be a Pandora’s box of spiritual phenomena which, once opened, will be difficult if not impossible to close again, and that before we open it, we should give lengthy, and due consideration to all the moral problems it will engender.

About Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and “strange stuff”. His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into “alternative history and science”.